Homily for the Sunday Mass of March 1st: “Walking with Jesus on our path”

Sunday, March 1, 2026
2nd Sunday of Lent – ​​Year A

Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

1^st Reading: Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm: 32 (33), 4-5, 18-19, 20.22
2^rd Reading: 2 Timothy 1:8b-10
Gospel: Matthew 17, 1-9

“Leave your country, your relatives and your father’s house, and go to the land that I will show you… Abraham went, as the Lord had told him.”

In a way, we have just heard a summary of your lives, you catechumens. If you have set out on this journey, it is based on the mystery of a word, whatever form that word has taken. If you are catechumens today, it is because God has spoken to you, in one way or another, and his word has set you on a path, and you do not know where this path leads. Oh, of course, one can say, "I am preparing for baptism," yes, but baptism is only a beginning. One can say, "I am preparing for the Christian life." What will this Christian life be like? One can say, "I want to receive baptism to be holy," yes, but how will this holiness unfold in your life? One can say, "I am walking toward the Kingdom." But what is this Kingdom? And how does it unfold? We do not know. And if we have any ideas beforehand of what it will be, either we will cease to follow Christ because what he will make us experience will not correspond to our plans, or we will be surprised.

But the same could be said of you who are preparing for marriage, and in a certain way, even more so, since it truly involves leaving your family and your father's house in order to get married. Remember: "A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." (Gen 2:24). We know roughly what marriage is, but what your life as a husband and wife, and I hope you will be as parents, will be like, you know nothing about.

All we know is that God promises us something. God always opens a future for us. But what is this future? To be a Christian, that is, to be a disciple of Jesus, is to accept that we no longer have complete control over our future. This doesn't mean there's nothing to prepare, nothing to plan for, but it means entrusting ourselves to another who guides us. Following Christ, being with Christ, is one way of understanding what it means to be a Christian. And if it means following Christ, it means going where he leads us.

Guy Gaucher, a Carmelite friar and expert on Saint Thérèse, came to lead a day of spirituality at the seminary in Issy-les-Moulineaux when I was a young seminarian. I remember one of his words that struck me: "The spiritual life isn't about moving forward and turning around from time to time to say, 'Hey, Jesus, are you following?' The spiritual life is about following Christ."

And that is why, in this strange event of the Transfiguration, God the Father tells us: "Listen to him"He reveals Jesus to us in all his glory, and with him, Moses and Elijah, in the undeniable presence of their being: Moses, who received the Torah, God's holy law for the people of Israel, the firstfruits of all nations, and Elijah, a great prophetic figure. The law and the prophets come as if to bow before Jesus, in whom God reveals himself entirely. “God, no one has ever seen him,” said Saint John at the end of his prologue, The only begotten Son, who is God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.” (John 1:18). The luminous cloud that evokes the presence of the Holy Spirit, the luminous cloud that will overshadow them as the Spirit will overshadow the Virgin Mary, this luminous cloud evokes the true tent into which the Lord Jesus will lead us. And this voice of the Father that points to Jesus: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: listen to him!”

Last Sunday, in the opening prayer of Mass, we asked that during this Lent, we might progress in the understanding of the mystery of ChristToday, we hear that it's truly about listening to Christ Jesus. And to listen to him, there's really no other way than to do what the Church has been doing since Pentecost: to read and reread the Holy Gospels constantly, to meditate on them, to let them sink into our hearts so that they may bear fruit. To listen to Jesus.

Saint Thérèse will tell us, as she wrote in a letter to her sister Léonie:

The only happiness on earth is to strive to always find delightful the portion that Jesus gives us. (LT 257 of July 17, 1897)

Because following Christ is fundamentally an act of trust. We don't know our future; we don't know what it will be, not on a personal level, not on a family level, not on a national level, not on an international level. We know almost nothing. What we do know is that Jesus is risen, alive forever, and that he is trustworthy. And so it is wise and reasonable to trust Jesus, to give credence to his word. All the more so because within this event of the Transfiguration lies a second event that is not always visible: Jesus is transfigured, his face became radiant like the sun, his clothes white as light. Jesus enters into the glory of God, as if his journey were complete, as if he had reached the end, the fulfillment of human life. He is already in the Kingdom and in the glory of the Kingdom. What is this second event that we risk overlooking, yet which is so evident? It is that the Transfiguration stops. Why does it stop? Because Jesus, for us men and for our salvationHe renounces his glory to freely enter into his Passion. And this is perhaps the most important event: Jesus renounces entering into glory in his humanity, to enter into it through his Passion and his Cross, and to enter into it freely. The Father does not make the Cross a condition for the glorification of the Son. It is together, in the Holy Trinity, that the Son freely gives himself for us and for our salvation.

As

Thérèse would write about it in her poem “Vivre d’amour” (Living on Love), at the suggestion of her sister Céline—once she had written her poem, which she had conceived shortly before Lent in 1895, she showed it to Céline, who said to her: “You haven’t mentioned the cross.” And Thérèse composed the fourth stanza, which begins thus:

4. Living on Love is not on earth

Set up your tent at the top of Tabor.

With Jesus is to climb Calvary,

It’s looking at the Cross as a treasure!…

(Mount Tabor is one of the hills not far from Nazareth on which tradition places the event of the Transfiguration.)

The Christian life is not about standing on Mount Tabor, constantly contemplating the glory of Jesus. The Christian life unfolds in the valley. In another passage from a letter to Céline, Thérèse says:

Our Lord wants to leave the faithful sheep in the desert. How much that tells me!… He is sure of them; they can no longer go astray because they are captive to love. Therefore, Jesus withholds his tangible presence from them to offer consolation to sinners, or if he leads them to Mount Tabor, it is only for a short time; the valley is most often his place of rest. “It is there that he rests at midday.” (LT 142 of July 6, 1893)

The valley that represents ordinary life, this valley that is often a valley of tears as we sing in the Hello Regina :

Ad te clamámus, éxules, fílii Hévæ.

To you we cry out, exiled children of Eve

Ad te suspirámus, geméntes et flente in hac lacrimárum válle.

To you we sigh, O Mary, groaning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Yes, our life is often filled with suffering, and it is up to us to remain attached to Jesus who leads us through the twists and turns of our existence towards the glory of the Kingdom.

So let us heed the exhortation of the apostle:

Beloved son, with the strength of God, share in the sufferings associated with the proclamation of the Gospel. For God has saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our own works, but because of his own plan and grace. This grace has become visible because our Savior, Christ Jesus, has revealed himselfWell, whoever we are, whatever our path, on this Sunday when the Church invites us to contemplate the Transfiguration of Jesus, let us contemplate Jesus who renounces this glory to come and walk with us on our paths.

But he asks that we let him go ahead, so that he may open the way for us, so that he may show us the way, so that he may remove certain obstacles and so that always, by walking in his footsteps, we may have the certainty of being on the right path.

Amen.